Coffee on Cold Mornings
by Lelila Solo
Summary: AU Swan Queen where FTL never existed and Storybrooke does (ish). Set after Neal's death.


_A/N: So, I realize that this is not a Tears of Isis update. I promise I'm working on that. I wrote this piece for my fiction class during my last semester of college. AU Swan Queen where Fairy Tale Land isn't a thing but Storybrooke is (ish). Set after Neal's death and subsequent funeral. _

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Coffee on Cold Mornings

The dress fluttered in the wind, the white tips meeting the ocean like foam that caps waves from the ferocity of tide. I guess that would make her a siren, calling to me from my vantage point on the shore. That water was freezing; her body was numb. But in my experience, sirens were never quite so lovely. Blonde hair flew up in the breeze around her face, a halo hung above her head in the mist, if you looked hard enough. Sometimes, I think it's held up by horns steeped in blood and then I realize I'm thinking of myself reflected in her tenacity. I can't tell her. Not after what happened today.

She stood out from the procession of mourners in her white dress, following the old ways as horses bore the casket down the streets of our small town to its final resting place after the funeral. There were no prayers with the service – he wasn't a religious man. Neither was she, a woman never leads the procession. But she did. It was right. Maybe the old ways were too old. All her life she had doubted him, and now there was new hope in his death, a clarity. A wish for a happy afterlife, for all to see. All in a dress. Recognition of the purity of intentions. Meanwhile the rest of us wore black.

But white meant mourning too.

My wedding dress was white, the symbol of virginal purity. But I mourned love lost. That day was not a happy one. My chin sagged with what my heart could not show until my mother tucked two fingers beneath it and pushed my head up and back. With pride, dear. I was marrying a rich man. There is no pride in an arranged marriage. My love had run away in the dead of night after my mother scolded him about our relationship. After my mother told him I was betrothed to another. In my country, one did not usurp a marriage arranged. There was always time for idle affairs on the side later, after the dust from the wedding bells had settled. It was over drinks at the least seedy bar in town when she finally asked me if I had been married before, this was the story that I told her. Sometimes, it is easiest to tell the truth to a perfect stranger. We had known each other for almost a year at that point, easing into a friendship that sometimes rivaled indignant enemies. She wasn't a stranger. But she was perfect.

My voice told of doubts to her intelligence at times, but secretly I admire her vast and eclectic assimilation of knowledge. I'm not surprised that she wore white that day. She had been a massage therapist when she lived in Florida, did I know that? How could I, until she told me, which she did one night after I invited her over for dinner and somehow let out that my back was sore. I had lain on white towels that she spread, hesitantly I will admit, while she worked out the knots that had bunched together muscles under my skin. That was when I learned that she never stayed in one place too long. Massage therapy in Tallahassee, bar tending in Seattle, bail bonds tracker in Boston, hotel manager in Salt Lake. She stayed under the radar. She slid between the cracks of society. She wanted for much. But she could make the best martini I've ever had. And apparently all the time he had been looking for her. Did she ever have a home?

Almost the understanding of how she finds solace in my presence escapes me. They met when she was much younger. She stole a car, one that he had already stolen, and escaped the police together. What a romance. But she was a teenager, an orphan, desperate. He was older and made her feel like she finally had something to call home. She shared this much during a drunken excursion and the next day had the graciousness to fill in the gaps. Our relationship was tenuous at best, but we had something in common. A pull towards each other. He framed her, sent her to prison until she was 18, a lesser being might say a modern day Romeo and Juliet, but it wasn't really. How long were they together for before that night? I never asked. When he found her ten years later, we were working in the same town and happened to run into each other frequently because of office. Mine was at city hall, her's the sheriff station. And yet we most often collided at a diner down the street. I remember how the hot chocolate mug fell from her hands when he walked in the door. We didn't know each other that well; she hadn't come over for dinner yet. There was a reason he had abandoned her to the police, but she never told me what he said it was and I don't think I would have believed it anyways. How could anyone abandon her? Not after knowing her.

She's like coffee on cold mornings when warmth penetrates your blood.

Everyone could see it on her face. That white hot blast of pain, the dull echo of grief suddenly rearing its scaly head to bite into the very center of her heart when he looked at her and smiled. Her hot chocolate created an ocean on the floor, the broken ceramic made islands. Pieces of you isolated from each other. You aren't a whole person when someone breaks your heart. I knew a second before it happened. The sound of bone against bone as her fist met his face. I was closest. It was instinct. I grabbed her arm, slung back for another go at the bruise forming under his left eye, and dragged her from the diner. Someone else held him back. I don't know who. All I could hear were the curses streaming from her lips faster than the tears formed rivers on her cheeks. I know. I know. I know. I chanted those words in her ear until she collapsed against me. There would be a mark tomorrow on my right collarbone from her pounding. That was the first time we got drunk together, that was when she told me how they met. Who he was. A romantic would say that was when I started falling in love. I never fell. It wasn't. She was too drunk to ask how I knew. She spilled beer down the front of my white blouse. I didn't care. At least she wasn't crying anymore. I couldn't fix the mug.

It was dark. We'd been out there for a long time. How many times had she come out of the tide? She would get frostbite. The wind had pushed the clouds far out over the see. The moon shone brightly to the east. She looked like a candle on the water.

I wish I could have cried. It was three years after my husband died. Two years since I had become mayor of the slightly pathetic town which his estate was located outside of. The estate I now owned and poured much of into the town to save its financial instability, much to the chagrin of his daughter. I readily would have split it with her; but she shouted defamation and poisoned my name to anyone who would listen to her. I cut her off from her precious trust fund. I think she's a school teacher now somewhere. We don't talk. It was just after I hung up the phone on her for the last time that he walked into my office. Unannounced. My he. The man who ran away in the dead of night with my heart all those years ago. I wish I had been blessed with the fortitude to punch him in the face the way she did. Or at least slap him. Instead I melted into his embrace as if time had stood still and he never hurt me. There was nothing to forgive. I knew how cruel my mother and her words could be. Bitterness harbored in my heart and germinated there, unbeknownst to me, for not calling him to attention for his part in my bondage. For his cowardice. Who was the coward? By the time I knew there was something wrong with us, there was something wrong with him.

We were both lost in thought; she standing in the cold November waves and me barely leaning on sandy rocks so as not to ruin the Prada jacket strapped across my body. But she'd come up from the waves, up to the beach she'd invited me to after the funeral. She needed to get away for a little bit, so that not everyone was barraging her with questions like the family that she never had. She needed to be alone. She didn't want these people around her, people who did not know her and did not know him. I was home. Would I come with her? I wanted to point out that my presence would negate any aloneness she was trying to accomplish, but she had slipped her arm between mine and I stayed silent. We walked. They whispered behind us. But no one stopped us. They loved her, adored her. She was their orphan. They had taken her in and nursed her back to health. Thick as thieves they thought we were. She had brought a little bit of light back to my name. Like an antidote. Maybe they were right. When she asked what I was thinking about, I clamped my vocal chords down, forbidding them to say what she could see in my eyes. Instead I told her about him, again. That we were the same. She and I. We had both lost someone twice. I didn't ask what she had been thinking about.

The cancer had eaten into most of his body before the symptoms showed. One day he came back from a routine morning jog with a nosebleed. It had been a headache before. One night he woke in bed with pains in his stomach. He was too sick to move the next day. After that he was fine. He died two weeks later. My money couldn't save him. Just like her strength couldn't save the one she loved from a motorcycle accident, even if she _had_ single handedly pulled a bike that weighed three times her weight off of him. What I would have given to save him for her. He was gone before she got there. Sometimes, life just happens that way. Didn't she know it. No one showed up for his funeral back then, not like they did today. This town was the rushing wind of gossip. After my husband's daughter had her piece to say, they all looked at me like I was some sort of Evil Queen for moving on. My heartbreak was not to be pitied. Not by the town I loved, the town I saved.

She called me a liar.

At first I thought she meant I was making him up, or the accusations of the town, but as she walked back down to the waves to numb her feet once more I realized that what I really was thinking about was her. Our lives were so dissimilar, and yet, so similar. We were the same. Never loved by family. Loved dearly twice by the same man each for such short fractions of time. Dying to get out ahead of a life that always won. I tore off my boots. I could buy a new pair. I chased her down to the frigid waters and my footsteps splashed while I cursed the fact that frost was already in the air. How many times had I watched her silhouette walk away from my porch in the light of a street lamp after an evening of talk, walking back to him? The cold didn't seem to bother her. She clasped the necklace I had never seen her without in her palm and ripped it from her neck. A simple circle. The broken chain hung between her fingertips, limp. I told her she would regret it as it disappeared beneath the stormy grey sea. I think, years later, a part of her did. It was a token of her old life. Her life with him. Maybe we weren't broken.

She wanted a new life. My hand laid across hers outstretched, white skin from cold. Her eyes swirled in the same shades of grey and green as the ocean that stretched out before us. How many times I had looked into them while my heart hammered and my teeth bit into my tongue until it bled the words that would spoil her dessert? In the white moonlight when she looked up, I knew she had been thinking about me.

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Thoughts?


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